“Hope” Shows Up at the national Portrait Gallery

 

The image of nicely dressed gallery technicians with white gloves caringly mounting Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” portrait of Barrack Obama is as puzzling as the art itself. Don’t get me wrong I like Shepard Fairey’s work. But the only way he could have gotten through the door of the National Portrait Gallery before Barrack Obama was to pay his admission fee like the rest of us. So why now?

 

• Carolyn Carr, the Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery quoted in the New York Times said.

“One of the reasons the gallery acquired it is the image, as opposed to the object, is ubiquitous and it became the image of the campaign”. Carr believes that Fairey’s image of Obama has a “Lasting Resonance”.

 

• I think she is right; Fairey’s image of Obama is really the image of the campaign and the idea that it is time for a new direction.

Perhaps the Obama portrait is the appearance of a New Peoples Art. As the art of Alexander Rodchenko was, images that motivate the masses to action as did Shepard Fairey’s posters in the Obama campaign. Shepard Fairey’s work takes on an almost chameleon effect dotted with the influences of past great propaganda artists like Rodchenko and John Heartfield. Dare I say that this obvious characteristic, this influence would have labeled Fairey as Too Sentimental in the past by many notable critics? But times do change as do critics. Maybe the art world is in search of something new, something that breaks out from the establish norm. Or maybe they just want to ride the wave of celebrity that Obama has brought to public eye.

 

• Perhaps Fairey’s work will become a part of a New Orwellian movement like his takeoff of the “OBEY”, slogan series from the movie “They Live”.

Sinister as it sounds the proof is in Fairey’s work, it supports the idea that some images have sustaining and influential power over the viewer. This idea is at the heart of Propaganda and the Art of Politics. Images reinforcing the idea, what ever that idea is, not to say that the Obama idea has dark motives, but it does certainly have a memorizing power that motivates people to action. Action in this case for positive change unlike the aliens who dominated the planet with images of OBEY in “They Live”. So has Fairey arrived as the Peoples Gangster Artist? Only time will tell the whole story of a “Lasting Resonance”. Shepard Fairey himself recognizes the modern attention span of his audience, I wonder if our collective curators do too.

 

• Read the New York Time Article:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/weekinreview/25kennedy.html?ref=us

 

 

On Tuesday, as Barack Obama was being sworn into office, his portrait by the street artist Shepard Fairey — reproduced endlessly during the campaign until it became the defining image of the future president (it towered over a stage at one of the inaugural balls) — was on view at the National Portrait Gallery. A collaged poster of it had just entered the collection along with portraits by artists like Gilbert Stuart (George Washington), Norman Rockwell (Richard Nixon) and Elaine de Kooning (John Kennedy).

N.Y.TIMES By Randy Kennedy

 

• Read More:

The Vocabulary of Change

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/rodchenko-heartfield-fairey-the-vocabulary-of-change/

 

The Art of Politics

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/the-art-of-politics/

 

The Art of Campaign Propaganda

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/the-art-of-politics/the-art-of-campaign-propaganda-obama-and-the-terrorist/

 

The Art of Propaganda VS DaDa

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/the-art-of-propaganda-vs-dada/

Filed under: Art, Art News, Art Prints, Culture Economey, Journalism, Media, News, On Art, african art , Alexander Rodchenko, Barrack Obama, National Portrait Gallery, Propaganda Art, Shepard Fairey, Street Art, The Art of Politics

Obama’s Call to the Arts

 

 

The folks over at Art Bistro posted this story about Obama’s plan for the Arts

 

What do you think!

 

http://www.artbistro.com/news/articles/8055-obamas-call-to-the-arts?page=1&referral=ab_nlet_R1_20090119

 

 

Expanding public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations.

Creating an Artists Corps.

Publicly championing the importance of arts education

Today is a new day of hope. January 20th 2009 will be a day that will forever mark history in America. Perhaps the lesson of tolerance The Arts have taught is a factor in this event. Perhaps the lessons that The Arts have to offer to a nation will help pave the way to a new future where the possible is the norm. I have HOPE!

Filed under: Art, Art Marketing, Art News, Culture Economey, Journalism, Media, News, On Art, Politics, african art , Art education, Artists Corps, Barack Obama Art, Obama and the Arts

The Passing of Andrew Wyeth 1917 – 2009

 

Wind from the Sea

 

The Passing of Andrew Wyeth 1917 – 2009

 

The gap between Andrew Wyeth and the modern art world is perhaps the same as the disconnection between modern society and the natural environment. Andrew Wyeth painted simple pictures of a simple life in his rural New England America. His painting however reflects on the complexities of even the most basic life lived.  The established art community of Andrew Wyeth’s generation shunned his work but he followed his chosen path and ignored his critics and he painted his world as he saw it. In my opinion, this in itself makes Wyeth a great American Painter. He was a man that saw and looked for an understanding of his immediate world, the world he lived in, using his neighbors, their simple lives and the landscape where he lived to capture stories he told us about them on his canvas.

 

Andrew Wyeth recorded the connection of the natural world and the sustaining human connection of life dependant on the environment. People in Wyeth’s portraits of rural New England America dig in the earth; slaughter their own meat, meat that comes from animals not kept as pets but as resources. Sustainability directly connected to the natural environment.  His imagery was of fields, hillsides, wildlife, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. He spoke of the tranquility of a simple life juxtaposed to its turbulence, its cruelty, its tenderness and compassion. He used details that connected his subjects to the functional environment, hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters and meat hooks. In the detail of his images exists the evidence of natural decay, violence and loss of entropy the nature of any system to run down. Fallen trees broken logs cracked ceilings and peeling paint portray the decay all things must under go.

 

“Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw,” wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New York’s Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth’s art “formulaic stuff, not very effective even as institutional realism . . .”

 

It is hard to imagine that his critics were so cruel so disconnected from his view of the world, from his art. Perhaps his critics suffer from the same disconnection from the natural environment, as does our modern society. We find nourishment in the freezer section of the Super Market without a connection to where our TV dinner came from. Of how the meat, the vegetables became part of the modern meal. A disconnection from the idea, that people worked with their hands in the dirt or bloodied their hands in the slaughter of the turkey that is their dinner, in the microwave.

 

Many of his critics suggested that Wyeth was out of touch with the artistic trends of his time. Abstraction and non-representational trends in the modern art of his time that have today become artificial, introspective and disconnected from nature, developed into a artificial nature of there own design. I would suggest that many museum directors and art critics have lost their ability to recognize any art that is not of the modern vocabulary they choose to recognize. The masters of the art world share a prejudice that has disconnected them from the natural environment and nature itself. Artists are victims of this prejudice too. Many of today’s contemporary artists are trained to make art that

simply stated, looks like what art is expected to look like. Others seek shocking and controversial imagery hoping to shock the critics into looking. This is not to say that modern art is without merit and that the many artworks are not important and valid. It is a suggestion that the critics and directors are to busy looking at what they believe is important that they ignore the artist who has a different insight a different point of view. These Masters of the Art-World have lost their objectivity their connection to nature. They have become artificial unto themselves and they have lost their vision if they ever had one to begin with. Andrew Wyeth was able to maintain his vision in spite of his critics and he was successful in following the path he chose for himself ignoring the experts. This is not to suggest that we as artists should be representational painters but that we should ask ourselves the deeper questions about our art, to explore our beliefs and intentions. To ask ourselves the hard questions that can’t be answered by the critic but only by our investigations into our own subject matter.

 

“In the art world today, I’m so conservative I’m radical. Most painters don’t care for me. I’m strange to them,” he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life magazine. “A lot of people say I’ve brought realism back. They try to tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken. I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins’ figures actually breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way; there’s another core — an excitement that’s definitely abstract.” Quote Andrew Wyeth

 

Andrew Wyeth wasn’t an artist without personal controversy. In the 1980’s when he unveiled his more than 200 works, 45 paintings and 200 sketches, the Helga series, he shocked the world and his wife who knew nothing about the artwork or the fifteen-year relationship Wyeth had with his model. Helga Testorf was Wyeth’s Chadds Ford neighbor who modeled for him over the fifteen-year period. Many of the paintings and sketches are of Helga nude. His images of her show her beauty and perhaps his love for her. I am not sure if this was a love affair but how can an artist who works so intensely with a subject not be in love. The work received the same welcoming for the critics.  It was not of their standard. Perhaps Wyeth revealed too much of his affection for Helga in the work, perhaps his vision was obscured by his love. Still, I find the Helga series hauntingly beautiful, connected to the natural desire between a man and a woman. The work is Illicit, torrid, sinful and at the same time tender, loving and natural.

Braids

 

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to display the Helga paintings. “We had an opportunity to show the Helga series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do so,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

 

Andrew Wyeth is a great American Artist; his work will be the subject of debate for many years to come. If the Masters of the Art-World ever hear Andrew Wyeth’s voice then perhaps art itself has a chance to move forward. Our modern disconnection with the natural environment, the tendency to overlook the simple complexities in the relationship of ourselves with nature is at the root of why modern art has stood still and why modern

society heads toward failure. We artists need to look again at our world with fresh eyes and we can learn from the legacy Andrew Wyeth has bestowed upon us.

 

 

Read More About Andrew Wyeth

 

UPDATE N.Y. Times Article.  For Wyeth Both Praise and Doubt

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17deba.html

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/16/america/wyeth.4-409557.php

 

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/16/AR2009011601420.html?hpid=topnews

 

 

Washington Post Photo Gallery

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/01/16/GA2009011602313.html

 

Filed under: Art, Art News, Art Prints, How to survive as a Working Artists, On Art, Painting, Uncategorized , American Artists, American Painting, Andrew Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth Dies at 91, Helga Series

Swimming with Water Wings in the River Styx

Guest Contributor

Jacob Eubank is a Photographer and Writer Living and Working in the Greater Seattle Area.

By Jacob Eubank

Gallery Photographs  http://www.jacobeubankphotography.com/ltgrant/

Swimming with Water Wings in the River Styx

On December 10, 2007, my father and I embarked on a journey that would take us across much of the Western United States. Just over a year ago, looking back provides an interesting perspective. We were certainly in different times.  Driving southward through Washington and the Oregon Coast our minds were focused on the devastation caused by tremendous rain and wind that occurred in the first weeks of the month.  Our trip was made possibly only because Interstate 5 had reopened only days before our departure. It had been closed due to flooding. Elsewhere in the country millions of people were struggling to keep their families fed in the midst of one of the worst series of ice storms that have hit the central United States in over a decade. It’s interesting to have come full circle, because as I’m writing today the waters are again receding. Now the second year in a row that I-5 has been closed due to catastrophic flooding. Nearly every river in a hundred mile radius was above its banks for three to four days. The conversations I have nearly everyday with neighbors and people who share my community are eerily similar to the conversations that transpired in the first days of our trip. Nobody can quite seem to recall the weather being this extreme in the past twenty years. It was only three weeks ago that we had over a foot of snow chocking the roadways of the greater Seattle area.  This snow stayed on the ground for over a week. It is undeniable that this is irregular. On our long drive to California, we thought much about this. Our leading scientists have concluded that even if our climate were on a normal rising cycle, humanity has still made an impact, and has accelerated this process beyond its normal pattern. Before December 2007, the Oregon Coast had never had a storm on record that had produced Category 3 Hurricane force winds. As we left Oregon and arrived in California adjusting our route to take us through Sacramento, we couldn’t help but see the extraordinary challenge that faces every one of us around every corner.

In Salem, OR I found a need for earplugs due to my fathers boisterous snoring. As I walked into the lobby of our motel I inquired with the clerk at the front desk where I might acquire such a thing. He responded kindly that I could just run over the Wal-Mart across the street. Perhaps I’m foolish and have just been too far removed from an automobile society living in the walk-able city of Seattle, for I took his words literally. As I started walking in my pajamas and flip-flops, I found out it was quite more than just across the street. In all, I ended up walking across roughly three quarters of a mile in each direction. My trek was across many vast parking lots.  As I walked I was reminded of one of the neighboring towns where I spent many days as a growing teenager. In the town of Kalispell, there used to be a thriving downtown. Many small independently owned businesses lined the streets; there was quite a lot of diversity for such a small community. Bookstores, art galleries, and many other attractions filled in around the Historic Hotel and saddle and tack store that remain relics of a time before ours. The last time I had come home had been quite the culture shock. I’d been away for almost a year, and upon arriving again it was as I had landed on Mars. In downtown Kalispell where Highway 93 shares the title of Main Street, roughly 40 percent of the business spaces were empty with signs of for lease availability in their windows. It has now been replaced with a development not unlike that of Salem. What once used to be flowing fields of wheat is now covered by asphalt. The aquifer that lies underneath it, which was once pure, untainted glacieral melt water ten thousand years in the making, is now forever linked to those parking lots. Those sewer drains that permeate the surface now carry all of the debris and carcinogens that fall from our vehicles, straight down to that very aquifer.

The next morning as we got back on the interstate with our headings towards Sacramento, the extent of how reliant we are on our automobiles for everything. The amount of cars on the road was staggering. I thought Seattle was terrible for traffic when I first moved there, and upon seeing Sacramento, I couldn’t imagine what Los Angeles is like. The connection between our reliance on the automobile, and our increasingly extreme weather patterns were becoming more unpredictable had become undeniable for me. I felt it was shameful that so few people could realize the true gravity of this situation.

California brought many other realizations as well.  As you come over the mountains in Northern California, you pass through Redwoods National Forest. This is one of our last great old growth forests in the United States. In 1991, nearly two decades ago, the National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry concluded that less that six percent of our forests consist of old growth. The tragedy found in the story of the American Redwoods is that there are no old growth Redwood Forests that exist any longer outside the gates of protected land. In just under a hundred and fifty years a once thriving and ancient forest was reduced to near exhaustion. A forest thousands of years in the making disappeared in just over an average persons lifetime.  This again hit home for me. Where I spent much of my youth was in the shelter of a similar forest. In the many acres that compose Glacier National Park, reside pockets of some of the oldest growth cedar that is found in Montana. In the past year, the forest that surrounds these protected lands has shared virtually the same tale. Over the last several years the community in the Flathead Valley has felt the same critical stress our forests of Northwest Montana have. As harvestable timber has become consumed faster than it can replenish itself, the radius in which retrieving that wood has expanded.  For a short time this business model was sustained by the creation of several trucking companies in the area to haul the materials the extra distance.  Slowly but surely though, those additional forested areas became thinned out, and the bubble burst. It quickly became apparent to these business owners that it was no longer cost effective to haul these immature logs as far as they were. As the logging industry began to collapse, larger corporations swallowed up the failing smaller independent sawmills, thus ensuring their business another few months at a time. Last week, Plum Creek, one of the largest timber companies in the country was for the first time forced curtailed its operations, by shutting down its MDF plant at its Northwest Regional Headquarters. This was one of the last large production lines that had remained open over the last several years. It is a huge blow to the community who had relied on Plum Creek as a reliable source of income. Now, with the environment at the edge of falling into chaos, the real costs are falling into the light. The cost of taking our forests in these ways is being set into the lap of “we the people.” It also threatens the species native to these old growth canopies. Disrupting the balance of biodiversity has wide and long-term effects. It leaves our forests prone to disaster, with nothing left standing to keep the balance. In the last decade there have been numerous naturally occurring events that have had huge consequences as there simply were and are not sufficient numbers of trees standing to survive these events. From bacterial and viral diseases such as Red Blister Rust that effects the ever becoming rare white pine trees, to invasive beetles that destroy the bark of several other species of pine to the point at which the trees atrophy and die. The point that kept resurfacing for us came again and again; what will the ultimate cost of our modern expansion be?

Within a day of leaving Sacramento, we finally arrived in Death Valley. In the middle of the night we drove into our first unobstructed view of the night sky either of us had seen for some time. As we parked the car in the middle of the highway and shut off the lights, darkness set in. I lit a cigarette and turned my eyes to the sky. Moments before, we had finished a conversation that led us to stop the car. We had been talking about the nature of the sky and the stars.  We had been focused on the central theme of how many people have never seen a night sky like we were experiencing. Many of the friends I had made since arriving in Seattle had spent their entire lives in the city. This was something I couldn’t imagine myself. So upon this realization, we stopped the car and got out.  As I inhaled my first drag and blew the smoke out through my nose, a giant green fireball tore across the sky. Death Valley really is incredible for one great reason in my mind. At night, you have an almost perfect 180-degree dome view of the sky. As this meteor rumbled over us, we were able perceive the curve of our atmosphere. The brush and dry cracked desert that it scoured were lit up with the green glow we all experience in the momentary flashes on July Fourth, except this lasted for seconds. As the light faded and we were plunged back into darkness we looked towards each other and just chuckled and simultaneously exclaimed, “Whoa…!” We finished our cigarettes and continued driving until we reached Stovepipe Wells. That night we spent many more hours under the night sky, reconnecting with the world our ancestors saw 10,000 years ago.  I went to bed that night after a few Johnny Walkers with the thought of how great it is that this truly special place has been set aside. The next day would prove to surprise me once again.

Furnace Creek is an interesting place. It is the second of only about five places in Death Valley where drinkable water has been found by drilling a very deep well. This is because the valley floor used to be an ocean, so the only water on the surface is full of salt, and therefore cannot be consumed. What we found in the late afternoon was something I never expected in a National Park. We pulled into the gas station furnace wells and as we filled up the car we surveyed our new surroundings. There is a small lodge and a few private residences fill the rest of this small settlement. In the middle of it all though, there were hundreds of Date Palms.  I’m not kidding, palm trees in the middle of a place that gets less than two inches of water a year. It was even more disheartening to discover their long established golf course. For decades now they’ve been pumping the little water in their special aquifer and using it to maintain that perfect green turf. I’m sorry, but I firmly believe Death Valley is no place for a golf course; A golf course in a desert like Death Valley offers as much purpose as making popsicles in an oven.  I was truly shocked to see that the NPS would allow non-native species to be planted within the boundaries of the park. The entire purpose of the NPS is to keep these wildernesses pristine. The golf course was just insult on top of that, a complete mockery of the design we have made for our special places that need to be preserved.

We explored the valley floor for a while longer, and had to make our way on home to Montana. The road out of Death Valley that we took led us on our way back North through Las Vegas. Our entry to the city of lights was the defining moment of our realization that has brought us to this project.  As you drive in or out of Las Vegas, on each end of the city you’re greeted by two separate power plants, one of which burns coal to generate electricity to run all of those sparkling lights that make up the Vegas Strip. We couldn’t help but think about how out of harmony we are with our planet.

Our drive continued through Utah, Idaho, and ended in Montana. Through the last leg of our trip we slugged along processing all that we had seen. Deciding we needed a rest, we took up residence in the lodge at Chico Hot Springs, MT.  It was the perfect end to our journey into the unknown.  In Chico, a few year round employees run a small lodge, the hot-spring pool, and a greenhouse and garden. During the summer months the community central to Chico grows their own food in the garden, much of it ending up used in the lodge’s restaurant. In the winter, they are able to maintain their comfort foods that normally would be out of season. They have a greenhouse that utilizes the hot mineral water to generate enough warmth in the soil for anything they want to grow.  They actually maintain an avocado tree year round, and are able to harvest that fruit in even the coldest winter months. They certainly have found a sustainable, low impact way of life in Chico. They don’t take more than is needed off their land, and because of such, will be able to benefit from the natural beauty of the hills and mountains of south-central Montana into the future. This was a glimmer of hope in the wake of such an incredibly desperate time in our history. The challenge is enormous; it is a scale of such magnitude that it will take the cooperation of people across the globe. Our trivial disputes of borders, religion, colors, and many of the things that make us different must stop. Without a decisive move on a global scale to abandon or alter our current trends and ways of life, we are all going to be recipients of the repercussions. If we continue to saw down our forests, pollute our air, destroy our clean water, and poison our land, our planet is going to become a harsh wasteland that is uninhabitable. This is the cost of our expansion. Many of these precious few resources that are still harvestable are dwindling. Much of the material is wasted in inferior quality design, the by-product of which is cities that are devastatingly impaired when it comes to surviving natural disasters.  If we keep expanding at our current rates, there will not be enough left to make it through another century before we consume everything on this planet. The degradation we see in the Western United States has only occurred in the last hundred and fifty years, and it’s speed grows exponentially every day. What is going to be the legacy we leave for the next two generations? With the changes that have occurred in the lifetimes of my father and his father, if this arrogant design that is the way we live is allowed to continue, there may not be much left in the world of my future grandson.

Filed under: Art, Art News, Art Prints, Culture Economey, Environment, How to survive as a Working Artists, Journalism, Media, On Art, Photography, Politics , Climate Change, Columbia Falls, Death Valley, Environmental News, Hurricane Winds, Jacob Eubank Photography, Kalispell, Montana Artists, Photography, Seattle Photographers, Washington Artists, Washington Flooding

Living on the Edges of 2012

Plum Creek winter 2007

Living on the Edges of 2012

A cold damp wind blows across my face; it burns the eyes, as I look toward a sky empty of artificial clouds of steam and smoke that once dominated my view of the valley where I have lived for the last 13 years. Today only, a passing car breaks the silence, as the constant hum of Plum Creek one of the largest sawmills in the Northwest is quiet. The sound of nothing is deafening and suddenly frightening. The mill had operated seven days a week working three shifts, seldom was there ever a break in the clouds of smoke and steam. The economic collapse that has rocked America has arrived in Columbia Falls is a small town of around 5000 residents known as the industrial heart of Northwest Montana with a stunning blow to our small community.  Plum Creek is one of the largest timber corporations America. They are also one of the largest landowners in the country only second to the Federal Government here in Montana and they are in desperate trouble. The demand for wood products have ceased with the collapse of the housing bubble.

My mind wanders as I listen to nothing this morning. I think about Last year 2007.

It seems like it was so long ago now that my son and I took a road trip to Death Valley. It was only a little over a year ago now. Our purpose was to take photographs to document our trip. It was a photographers outing. We both just wanted to get away from the must do’s of work and life itself. But that trip turned into something far beyond what I expected as did the coming year 2008. We had two weeks to ourselves, no obligations. The impending changes of 2008 that December before were just talk. Talk about how improbable it was that Barrack Obama would even make it through the primary elections let alone become President. The economy was not really on the radar as much as climate change. We drove south from Seattle down the coast where a category 3 hurricane type storm battered the northern west coast like never before. The road, lined with trees torn out of the ground, snapped off mid trunk as if twigs were a testament of the power of that storm. Seawalls breeched by record tides flooded; devastated the small towns along the west coast that were now in a state of organized recovery. No national press about this storm dominated the news like Katrina but the damage was impressive, severe. We stopped to take pictures and walk on the beach in Oregon. You would hardly know that only a few days ago the ocean covered shoreline up to the first stories of homes and hotels along the beach except for the line of debris that had been contained along the sea walls. People were collecting wood scattered by the storm, building fires to warm themselves as they waited for the sunset. A man was moving big logs on a stairway that led up to a patio at one of the hotels, was asked him how all those logs got there. He told us about the storm and that he had never seen the water come up as far as it did water pushed by a weeks worth of hurricane force winds. He told us how the town of Oceanside had been cutoff with no escape by tidal flooding that blocked the roads. He told how the residents banned together to help each other and share food and whatever else they had.

As we journeyed on toward our destination, we talked a lot, about the effects of coastal flooding we had witnessed and changes that were occurring right now. Maybe it was just random events as weather is, or maybe not. We talked about the Mayan calendar and the Hopi prophecies http://www.geocities.com/whitecrystalmirror/prophecy.html that predict and end to this phase of modern civilization in 2012. We talked about how these prophecies might play out, how this might happen. Would natural disasters like Katrina, Oceanside or the results of climate change, play a role in the end of modern civilization? Or would our behavior today as a society be the catalyst for failure.

After a long day of driving, we approached Death Valley it was dark. Night comes early in December.

Stop here I have to take a leak. Here was nowhere in the middle of nothing, just a dark road, where no artificial light could penetrate the darkness except the headlights of the car that connected Death Valley with the rest of the world. Turning off the car and headlights, we got out of the car, lit a smoke, and proceeded to relieve ourselves when the sky lit up like a roman candle.  As monstrous greenish blue fire ball with a tail that stretched across the horizon burned right over our heads. Did you see that? “What the Fuck was that”, Jake said. “A meteor I think”, I answered. Excited by the event our consensus was, let’s go!  We jumped into the car and headed down a steep grade that seemed to go on forever to the valley floor. Every now and then as the road turned the headlights, spied large water tanks located in turnouts. The water tanks were a reminder of where we were and how fortunate it was December and not August because the modern automobile is still no match for natural heat of that desert.  As we arrived at Stovepipe Wells, we were still taking about that Meteor. That Meteor and the hundreds we saw over the next couple of days really change me, as did the scorched wasteland that is Death Valley. That was little more than a year ago December 2007 before the turmoil of 2008 had occurred. I really didn’t know then what I know now because now was the future then.

Now it seems that economic collapse is perhaps the immediate threat to the system of how we live. The cascading failures of banks and businesses that have sustained our way of life are collapsing. Perhaps the Mayans and the ancient ones of the Hopi Indians knew that history has a way of repeating itself, that human prophecies are self-fulfilling. These events of collapse and failure are the historical facts of life of written history of history no longer spoke by silent voices. A silent history recorded in the ruins of past civilizations here in the American Landscape. These Ancient ruins and ghost towns preserve the presence and failure of our ancestral people and our history.

Today the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, CFAC is also quiet; their plotlines are cold and empty, as the demand for high-grade aluminum has vanished and the costs of energy and material have soared.  CFAC as we call them around here has announced that they can no longer operate at today’s prices in today’s metals market on Christmas Eve and they have decided to close permanently.

Semi Tools a high tech company a front-end manufacturer in the computer industry, a company that supplies the computer manufacturing industry worldwide with the machines that actually make your computers.  Announced they have to reduced production and cut their workforce by more that fifty percent. These dramatic events have occurred over the last two weeks, with CFAC announcing on Christmas Eve they will close permanently and Semi Tool and Plum Creek making their announcements this past Friday January 9 they will curtailed until further notice. This news came to workers who were on mandatory furlough for the past month as an emergency cost saving measure by all of these companies had returned to work after the first of the year. In addition, Plum Creek has told all of their contractors to stop work, stop logging operations. The news is devastating for a small town a small community and for America, that is already suffering the effects of the housing and construction market failure. In one week, more than a tenth of our small population lost theirs jobs and these were the highest paying jobs in the Flathead Valley as well as Montana.

We moved to Columbia Falls about 13 years ago where I became the Director of the local Art Museum located in downtown Kalispell Montana. This was at a time of franchise infancy in the community. Wal-Mart and Costco arrived to the Flathead valley just after the first McDonalds. Before that, the infrastructure of the Flathead Valley was local Mom and Pop un-franchised businesses. The Flathead Valley of Northwest Montana was mostly untouched by the mass distribution of corporate enterprises that dominate the larger communities of America. Its sense of place was unique; a small Home Town, a Rural Paradise that offered a haven from the large urban communities of modern America. It was a place where a kid like Jake can grab a towel and walk to the end of the street to the community swimming pool with no worries. Thirteen years after McDonalds and the explosion of Franchise Businesses I can hardly recognized the original community I moved too in 1996. The valley has taken on the same visual characteristics as the rest of America it has become part of the Homage-O-Nation! As you drive through the valley on U.S 93, the landscape reveals the same architecture, a true assimilated American Community. Wal-Mart, Boarders, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Walgreen’s and a plethora of corporate franchise restaurants to supplement a major anchor complex. You seen one you seen em all. This is how goods and services are delivered today, the Architecture is functional and predictable, a box with ornamentation stuck on it giving each box an identifiable appearance, or as I like to think of it, a CODE. One-step farther inside the box and we identify the product line. It really doesn’t matter what McDonalds you walk into anywhere on the planet, you know you can get a Big Mac and you identify the product with the architectural Code. The architecture is the reinforcement of the Code an image of the corporation, the franchise; it is part of the brand. This is where the sameness of products of the landscape, cityscape and culture started. The code or brand reinforces the product into our culture and our ideas about ourselves changed. We began to seek our comforts in unifying products. These products help us define our status or place in the social economic pecking order. These product identifications, brands, codes enhance our personal likeability our sexuality to others. Many of us now live in towns in houses and neighborhoods that all look alike. Even the color of the houses and building are regulated, all the same color scheme, no variation on the theme is tolerated.

The Development that we have come to believe we need, that we want, has created a sameness that has overtaken the cultural landscape across an America of endless McDonald’s, Strip Malls and Big Box Stores that has grown into new cities and towns, not built to live and walk in, but to drive to. Development and Sameness has changed us as a culture. Perhaps this is how it happened? Developers brought us development and products and we were all told we needed them and we believed the developers, the corporate retailers, and their advertising and we believed we needed these products. This idea is in stark contrast to having true needs and then developing products and services to fill our true desires and needs. I am sure we all really want a MacDonald’s hamburger that is smaller than the pickle slices on the bun. But “Your Love n It”.

Today’s headlines detail the failure of our way of life, a human system on the brink of Collapse. If the effects of this rapid growth this manmade disaster only impacted Columbia Falls and the Flathead Valley then perhaps emergency aid and relief could help stabilize the situation. The effects are in fact global and not centralized to us alone. The effect of our modern model and its collapse will touch all of us around the world in ways; we have yet to experience because of “How We Live” and our dependence on a global market place that apparently according to world leaders has become un-stable, unsustainable.

This is not a new story in the history of civilization. It is a story of transition from the past to the present and an uncertain future. Several years ago, I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_9780670033379,00.html

He compares modern Montana with past civilizations. He writes about the people of Chaco Canyon http://eubank.home.bresnan.net/ and the failure of their system, their way of life. They exhausted the natural resources that had been the source of their success as a culture. In the end the climate, the environment changed and civilization failed. Throughout the Western United States lay the ruins of the past. The people vanished as their environment no longer sustained them, from the Wupatki http://www.nps.gov/wupa culture in northern Arizona to the Chaco http://www.nps.gov/chcu Culture in New Mexico they were gone with countless others. Today the reasons why these civilizations failed is part speculation and part science, the mystery of what, when and where they went remains un-spoken in stories of a vanished civilization. After reading Diamond’s account of the failure of the Chaco Culture, I wanted to go to New Mexico and see for myself this place of mystery of un-spoken stories. As I embarked on my expedition of discovery in November of 2006, I went as an Artist not as a Scientist. My discoveries are intuitive, based on my feeling about this place.  My intuition, my gut feeling about what happened and what remains were my source, my sense of this place. Diamond writes about an enterprising culture that had a purpose to develop beyond their limits and technology to sustain them. They were a culture that destroyed their sustainable environment for the sake of development of expansion. It is un-clear in the forgotten stories why this development was so important to the Chacoan’s.  Some archeologists believe the people used the pueblos during ceremonial seasons and that only a small population of people inhabited the area year round. As the story goes, thousands of visitors would come to Chaco during the ceremonial seasons to celebrate their stories, their beliefs. Perhaps this account is true or maybe there is a story untold. Diamond writes about how the people deforested the landscape. They cut down all of the trees of what once was a forest far beyond what the eye can see into the distance from the canyon so they could build their city. What remains is a desolate landscape void of any large trees. Ponderosa Pine covered the landscape before. Diamond estimates that the Chaco people cut down tens of thousands of trees as far away as a sixty-mile radius from the Chaco site. This was a time when horses did not roam the landscape and all of the timber moved was by the manual labor of the people. They carried or pulled the fallen trees to the city and they built great structures. In the process, they changed the flow of water, their life substance and slowly the environment turned against them. Corn, which was the food of the gods no longer, grew in this place. Slowly they vanished as a culture. There is evidence that the last Chacoan’s began recycling. They salvaged material from older buildings and reused them to continue building new ones. But this was an effort too late because the environment became the master of this land– a land unable to sustain a human presence. To be sure, descendants of the Chaco Culture still exist. Fragmented disenfranchised from one another they either sought survival on their own or assimilated into other groups. They became us a thousand years into the future or perhaps we have become them and as future inhabitants look back from a thousand years forward.

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=IESYMFtLIis

For me Jared Diamonds story of Chaco Canyon has real meaning as a modern Montanan. As the economy, stock markets and global development soared to never before seen heights, the evidence of the cost of that great expansion are present all around us. Building boomed as more people bought homes and big rides SUV’s. Corporate development seemed destined to reach every undeveloped area in the modern landscape while small and large sawmills closed by the dozens and left once thriving communities dependant on them devastated in the wake of their failure. If you look at a map of Montana where the forests cover the land every community saw, mills go out of business. They failed in the midst of one of the most prolific periods of building and development in our history. Over the last ten years, year after year dozens of wood product, timber businesses failed after decades of sustainable production. Why, the availability of harvestable timber was not, is not available, it is gone. The once abundant old growth timber stands are gone, harvested. The existing stands today are in a second harvest or re-growth period. The re-growth period of Timber in this region spans the measure of a human lifetime, about 80 to 120 years. The second growth timber now harvested, replaced the old growth stands harvested a century ago. Add to this the devastation of forests by fire and rural development the supply of harvestable trees declined disproportionately with the development of our society. Today’s demand has placed unsustainable pressure on the natural system, demand on the forests for trees. Timber a renewable resource for the wood products industry is now on the fringe of collapse with the pressure of current demand. Time is the enemy in our current business model. Demand operates on a much faster clock than natural growth.

People ask me if I am a religious man and I tell them I am a spiritual man. Religion I think is a collection of ideas that a group of people agree on, principles that the group shares and follows. A spiritual belief recognizes the ideas and principles of all religions and agrees to share with tolerance those that seek a higher truth the fundamental truth of all things.

Jake and I discovered a joy in the adventure together and found that our ideas, our hopes, our paths were spiritually connected through our individual work as Artists, Photographers, Writers and our relationship as Father and Son”. While we were sitting under a sky full of falling stars in the desolation of Death Valley, we arrived at a moment, an idea that things fall apart that all things change and are renewed. We talked at length about the environment and the impact of our modern society. We talked about how millions of modern people have never seen the real sky, unmasked of the artificial illumination of modern cities. We talked about the disconnection of modern human beings from their natural environment and we wondered how civilization could go forward with out reconnecting to the natural environment in a sustainable way. Our present time is shocking and full of fear and the unknown, of what the future may bring. But if we are still the masters of this place this land this planet then we have the power to choose our future a sustainable future.

Elders Speak

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1299816/indigenous_native_american_prophecy_elders_speak_part_1_5/

Coming Soon Energy and Metal

About The Project http://davideubank.wordpress.com/about-jacob-and-david-eubank-and-the-living-on-the-edges-of-2012-collaboration/

Sources:

Semi Tool

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/11/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_01.txt

Plum Creek

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/09/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_02.txt

CFAC

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/09/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_02.txt

CFAC and Plum Creek

http://www.hungryhorsenews.com/

Plum Creek Formaldehyde pollution

http://www.scorecard.org/env-releases/facility.tcl?tri_id=59912PLMCRPOBOX

http://www.hungryhorsenews.com/articles/2004/09/29/news/news01.txt

About Plum Creeks New Bio Filter System

http://www.timberbuysell.com/community/DisplayNews.asp?id=3681

Blog about Formaldehyde

http://www.toxictrailers.org/2008_03_01_archive.html

Toxic Emmissions

http://static.uspirg.org/reports/toxics03/toxicreleases1_03report.pdf

• Coming Soon Energy and Metal in Montana

Filed under: Art, Art News, Culture Economey, Environment, How to survive as a Working Artists, Investing, Journalism, News, On Art, Photography, Uncategorized , Columbia Falls Montana, Economic Predictions 2009, Obama Stimulas Plan, Plum Creek, Sustainablity

Change Happens

 

• It seems like it was so long ago now that my son and I took a road trip to Death Valley.

It was only a little over a year ago now. Our purpose was to take photographs to document our trip. It was a photographers outing. We both just wanted to get away from the must do’s of work and life itself. But that trip turned into something far beyond what I expected as did the coming year 2008. We had two weeks to ourselves, no obligations. The impending changes of 2008 that December before were just talk. Talk about how improbable it was that Barrack Obama would even make it through the primary elections let alone become President. The economy was not really on the radar as much as climate changes. We drove south from Seattle down the coast where a category 3 hurricane type storm battered the northern west coast like never before. The road lined with trees torn out of the ground and snapped off as if twigs were a testament of the power of that storm. Seawalls breeched by record tides had devastated the small towns along the coast that were now in a state of organized recovery. No national press about this storm like Katrina was in the headlines but the damage was impressive. As we journeyed on toward our destination, we talked a lot about changes that were occurring right now. Maybe it was just random events as weather is, or maybe not.

 

• After a long day of driving, we approached Death Valley it was dark.

Night comes early in December. Stop here I have to take a leak. Here was nowhere in the middle of nothing, just a dark road that connected Death Valley with the rest of the world. We got out of the car, lit a smoke, and proceeded to relieve ourselves when the sky lit up like a roman candle.  As monstrous greenish blue fire ball with a tail that stretched across the horizon burned right over our heads. Did you see that? What the F_ _ _ was that Jake said. A meteor I think I answered. Let’s go! So we jumped into the car and headed down a steep grade that seemed to go on forever to the valley floor. As we arrived at Stovepipe Wells, we were still taking about that Meteor. That Meteor and the hundreds we saw over the next couple of days really change me, as did this scorched wasteland that is Death Valley. But that was in 2007 and I really didn’t know then what I know now because now was the future then.

 

•  As I watched my son work, I realized how much he had learned in school, studying his craft as a Photographer.

He was perfectly at home with a camera in his hands; the camera was an extension of him now. He had encouraged me to bring his old digital camera with me; I wasn’t really a digital guy then, so struggled with this new gadget. While for him, the digital technology was just part of him. Jake I thought has always had a good eye a Photographers eye an Artists eye. Even back when he was a kid and I taught him how to develop film in the laundry room. He always made interesting and stunning images. Now I got to see him working at a professional level with confidence and excitement.

 

We spent the next couple of days running around Death Valley taking pictures by day and talking about what we had done around a campfire at night while watching an amazing meteor shower drinking Johnny Walker. Too soon, we headed home to Montana, it was the holidays and we promised to come home. Jake finished school and graduated in June. I went back to work life was good. Then came the bust, chaos, fear, and well you all know the story so it needs no repeating. Jake is still taking pictures, but jobs are lean. Me I am laid off for the winter and hope that spring will bring more work; there is nothing here in Montana now. That seems to be the story across the country, bad news and more bad news. Its damm, depressing.

 

 

Jake and I are beginning to work on a new project and have been talking on the phone and planning. Death Valley and our experience there is a starting point for what I, we hope will be an exciting Photo Documentary project, a future project. You see we have to keep going, we have to keep keeping on. So this is where I leave you with a poem I wrote about our trip last year.

 

 

 

 

 

You can’t see the meteors for all of the shooting stars

 

 Meteors hidden by the tales of shooting stars

 

Foreign palm trees thirst in the sands at the bottom of the world

 

The desert broom blossoms with scant drops of morning dew

 

Butterflies nap in shady crevasses of wash cut walls waiting for the night

 

Ravens fly to and fro calling to those who wait for their voices ready to hear

 

Land void, punctuated by the transgressions of fickle men

 

Abundant rainbows of solitude waiting to fill the dry breath of eyes looking

 

Spring weeps courageous over the land parched after seasons of scorched thirst and death, full of breath and spirit and life

 

Do not grieve that; that is to pass and passing, continuance replenishes the void

 

Hope rises with every new sun; rest comes when coolness covers the world with a moon dark

 

Shooting stars hide meteors with fireworks in the moonless sky

 

Glass bottles melt in the fire so hot, cracking in the cool desert air into mirrors reflecting the end of all things that must come

 

Morning brings the grey dove of this desert that feasts on the ashes of the night lost

 

Follow the raven that sees over the horizon, flying without fear he enjoys today, his kind knows tomorrow having survived countless yesterdays in the barren landscape many forsake, hope is found by those who look, who see

 

Tomorrow will come as stars fall from a blue sky, be not like the coyote who waits at the crossroads for his dinner, fly with the raven who is master in this land

 

Wear hope like the meteor whose copper green beacon fills the sky

 

Falling stars have marked time since the beginning of everything

 

 The Raven sees meteors when no one else is looking

 

See more of Jakes work at Jacob Eubank Photography Seattle Washington.

 

Jacob Eubank and the Raven

http://jacobeubankphotography.com/

 

 

Filed under: Art, Art News, Art Prints, Culture Economey, Environment, How to survive as a Working Artists, Journalism, Media, On Art, Photography, Uncategorized , Change, Death Valley, Photo essay, Poetry